Small Cells Outnumber Traditional Mobile Base Stations

Report claims milestone driven by femtocell networks hitting scale and also notes emergence of the Small Cell as a Service model

October 31, 2012 – Informa Telecoms & Media today issued its latest quarterly small-cell market status report which highlights that the global number of small cells now exceeds the total number of traditional mobile base stations. The report shows that between October and November 2012, the number of small cells has surpassed 6 million (6,069,224) with macrocells worldwide totaling 5,925,974. Although the bulk of these numbers (over 80%) are made up of residential femtocells, which will alone overtake the total number of macrocells early next year, they also include enterprise and public-access small cells. There are now 45 small-cell deployments including nine of the top 10 operators by revenue globally.

This milestone was made possible as mature femtocell deployments start to scale and was best illustrated by Sprint which has now deployed one million femtocells – up from 250,000 in 2011. The report also highlights how new femtocell deployments from Telefónica O2, Orange UK, and Bouygues Telecom over the Summer mean that the UK and France have become the first countries globally where all major operators have deployed the technology. Telefónica O2 has made significant public-access progress with the world’s densest femtocell deployment in east London for the Olympics, as well as the launch of public Wi-Fi in central London which will be upgraded imminently to support licensed small cells.

The report also highlighted the emergence of the Small Cell as a Service (SCaaS) model which allows third parties to roll out a small-cell network and then rent it to several operators thereby lowering the barrier to entry for deployment and total costs. In this space over the past quarter, Virgin Media announced it is trialing LTE small cells in the UK ahead of launching its Small Cell as a Service offering and Colt Telecom announced it is already in trials with a major European operator. Furthermore, two new companies – Cloudberry Mobile and ClearSky have launched their own offerings in Europe and the US, respectively, targeting smaller operators.

“There are now more small cells than macrocells worldwide. The industry has passed a very important milestone and in the process changed the future direction of mobile networks. The days of small numbers of expensive cell towers have given way to the era of high numbers of low cost mini access points. Without this change, the mobile network simply could not sustain the continued growth in data usage,” said Dimitris Mavrakis, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media. “Such a dramatic network transformation opens up interesting new models and over the past quarter the Small Cell as a Service idea has been gaining traction. It allows third parties to build networks that several mobile operators can use, thereby reducing costs and time to market. At the moment, this is being targeted at major operators that are looking for a simple route to establishing a small-cell network as well as smaller players that have found the barriers to entry too high to date.”

Informa Telecoms & Media independently researched and produced this report for the Small Cell Forum (@smallcell_forum). The report is updated on a quarterly basis and is published free of charge on the Small Cell Forum’s website here – http://bit.ly/A7w7ik.